The movie genre Quentin Tarantino always wanted to tick off his bucket list but never will: “I’d love to”
When Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene in the early 1990s, he brought this fresh approach to dialogue and narrative that a landscape overpopulated by Hollywood blockbusters really needed.
Reservoir Dogs was snappy and outrageous, violent and fast-paced, changing indie cinema for good, and Pulp Fiction was next up, but not before he could secure some funds by selling a few scripts that would be directed by other filmmakers. Natural Born Killers ended up in the hands of Oliver Stone, although many of his ideas were greatly changed before it went into production, whereas True Romance, which stayed true to Tarantino’s screenplay, was directed by Tony Scott.
True Romance is, to date, the most romantic thing Tarantino has ever written. It might contain a fair bit of struggle, violence, and bizarre characters like Drexl Spivey, Alabama’s awful pimp, but at its core is a relationship between Alabama and Clarence that endures in spite of everything. “You’re so cool,” she says to him, as Hans Zimmer’s Badlands-inspired soundtrack plays. It’s dreamy, even if Alabama and Clarence have to face plenty of violence, and even murder, before reaching their happy ending.
Natural Born Killers similarly follows a lovers-who-kill Bonnie and Clyde-esque set-up, but it’s True Romance, out of everything Tarantino has conjured up, that feels the most pure. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Tarantino actually loves a romance movie. He might be better associated with crime and westerns, even the samurai genre, but the filmmaker has a real soft spot for a rom-com.
“I’d love to make a romantic comedy and take it out of the ghetto it’s been exiled to,” he revealed to Film.com, “I have done love stories, they’ve just been in my other movies. True Romance‘s title was not ironic. Sure, James Gandolfini almost beats Patricia Arquette to death, and she has to blow him away with a shotgun, but that doesn’t mean it’s not romantic. It just has to be done my way, and I think people want me to do it my way.”
The rom-com genre has long been taken less seriously than other genres, even though there have been so many incredible ones over the years, from 1934’s It Happened One Night to 1989’s When Harry Met Sally….
Every genre has its bad entries, but it’s the rom-com genre that seems unfairly chastised for its missteps, which somehow become representative of the entire canon. Of course, it’s all to do with a gender bias within the industry, you don’t need me to tell you that.
So, for all of Tarantino’s questionable run-ins with women in his movies over the years, it’s somewhat surprising that he actually wants to make a movie in a stereotypically ‘female’ genre, but perhaps he’d do a good job of it. After all, he’s seen a lot of them. Seriously, he loves everything from the Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore vehicle Music and Lyrics to the Nancy Meyers film It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep. He knows his stuff.
But Tarantino is only planning on making one more movie in his career, and it’s almost certainly not going to be a rom-com. He most recently had plans for a film called The Movie Critic, but this was eventually scrapped, leaving his final movie an ongoing mystery, even to himself. You never know, however, because he might turn around and surprise us all with a romantic comedy as his final bow out of the industry.
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